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Month: January 2008

Help! Anybody out there an expert in Microsoft Word 2007? I’ve been using it to produce PDFs and it’s worked great – until recently. For the last few weeks I’ve suddenly been getting this white space on the right and bottom borders. It doesn’t appear in the Word version of the document, only when I save as PDF. I’ve tried everything I can think of – nothing has worked so far. Any advice much appreciated!

A Fisher Space Pen I ordered from the USA via Ebay a week ago just arrived. Want to plug the store – Cyber Space Pens. A new x-750 cost me only AU $32.55 delivered to my door. That’s about 50% or less of what I’d pay locally in a store. I’ll be buying many more pens and refills from these folks.

On January 27, 2008, a small group of people gathered in South Melbourne for the inaugural meeting of Geeks Who Care, a group of geek activists who want to be more involved in their local communities.
Attendees are (L to R):
Colin Wilson, Matt Trentini, David Jackson, Father Bob Maguire, Cameron Reilly, Nay Parkinson, Tony Goodson, Miriam Parkinson

The two outcomes we agree to were:

1. to set up some face to face meetings with teenagers living in public housing communities in South Melbourne to run some of our ideas past them, to sanity check our thinking

2. to explore the idea of providing mesh networks and refurbished PC’s to kids in public housing around Melbourne.

There was an interesting discussion about whether or not GWC should be focused on providing technology-related solutions for people, to leverage our geek-fu, or just doing basic “good works” that aren’t specifically technology related. The general feelings seemed to be to try to do something geek-specific.

If you have any ideas on how to build out mesh networks for public housing communities, please throw your ideas around over on our Geeks Who Care forum.

The Press Council’s 2007 report shows a slightly healthier situation, with a handful of papers actually showing growth from 2001 – 2007. I’ve posted the main graph of Metro papers here (you might need to grab the actual image to read the details). To make it easy, I’ve coloured the papers with declining readership in yellow and the ones maintaining steady in grey.

However – when you read their report in depth, you notice that there has been some creative accounting with these figures in a desperate attempt to forestall the knowledge that their industry is closer to death than General Suharto (what? he died today? well…. let’s say Castro.)

A significant development has been the unprecedented initiative taken by newspaper proprietors, acting collectively, to establish a new organisation, The Newspaper Works, to reaffirm to advertisers in particular that newspapers offer them a better and more influential platform than other media and, complementarily, to improve total newspaper circulation and readership. The new organisation has also undertaken, in conjunction with polling organisations, to try to improve the techniques used to measure circulation and readership of print editions and to measure newspaper website traffic accurately.

(Italics mine).

So – they are factoring in their online readership. Fair enough. Here’s the secret though – as I’ve argued here before – the transition from paper to online is VERY BAD for the print news business. Why? Isn’t a reader a reader? It’s the economics, stupid. When you buy The Age, how much do you pay for the privilege? A dollar fifty? I’m not sure, i don’t buy it (unless I’m in it). When you read The Age online, how much do you pay? Nada. So – they are automatically making less money. What about advertising? Well – let’s say you’re an advertiser. If you want to advertise in a newspaper that people in Melbourne read, how many options do you have? A handful? If, however, you want to advertise on websites Melburnians read, how many options do you have? Bazillions. And that number is just getting bigger every year. So it’s simple supply and demand economics. You don’t make as much money from an online reader as you do from a print reader.

Okay, so revenues must be in decline. What happens next? Do they hire MORE journalists? No. As everybody knows, they hire less journalists. And so the quality of their content goes down. Does that make readership go up? I don’t think so. And so the cycle of rot sets in. Print news organisations have a very expensive operation on their hands. When revenues go down, when people get down-sized on a regular basis, morale drops and… hey I’ve seen it happen in a million IT companies. It’s what happens when you think you’re invulnerable to generational change driven by technology and you think your brand has some kind of magical power which will continue forever. Basically – you’re sucking on your own exhaust pipe.

We’ve had an opportunity to witness this last week with the announcement that ACP is closing down The Bulletin, a magazine I was fortunate to appear in a couple of times – when Josh Gliddon did the first MSM coverage of TPN back in Feb 2005 and again in October 2006. The Bulletin’s circulation had been down and it just didn’t make sense to keep it open, according to ACP management. And we all know how disinterested Packer 3.0 seems to be in the media business.

What did the ACP execs have to say?

The Bulletin is Australiaâ€™s longest running magazine and was launched in 1880.

In the latest Audit Bureau of Circulations figures, The Bulletin had 57,039 in sales (Sept 07), which is down from circulation highs of over 100,000 in the mid 1990s. This trend is consistent with that experienced by many leading weekly news and current affairs magazines globally and is somewhat symptomatic of the impact of the internet on this particular genre.

I have always wanted one of these caps that Che Guevara used to wear. I’ve looked all over Melbourne but couldn’t find one. Then last week I found The Che Store. The cap is said to be “the same Basque-style beret, with a silver metal star on the front and tip on top, worn by Che.”